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Monday, January 18, 2016

As a
reminder, which you probably don’t need because I’m excited and won’t shut up
about it, I wrote a game! It’s called Young Centurions, and it’s a roleplaying
game (RPG) about teenage pulp heroes. There’s excitement! Thrills! Bad guys! And
you have to beat them all and make it home in time for supper, or you’ll be in
trouble with your Ma. Anyway, you can learn more about it here if you’re
inclined to do so.

I’ve been
talking about educational opportunities for gaming with kids (you can read the first one here), because as a
gamer and a parent, I’ve used RPGs a lot and think more people probably would
if only they knew what they were missing. And sure, I hope you might put these
suggestions to use with my game, but even if you picked something else, I’d
consider it a win. (In fact, I’ll suggest another one for people not into
pulp—it’s called Do: Fate of the Flying Temple, and it’s kinda like Avatar: The
Last Airbender and How to Train Your Dragon had a baby, and this game is that
baby.) In my last post, I talked about teaching cause and effect, and now I’d
like to talk about how you can use storytelling RPGs to make failure
interesting.

Here’s the
thing—as a parent, I’m constantly reassuring my kids that mistakes are good
things. That trying something and failing doesn’t mean you suck; it just means that
you’ve got a challenge on your hands. That some of the best learning
opportunities come from the things that don’t come easy. Each of our kids has
their wheelhouse, and of course the other two are jealous. Frankly, if they had
their druthers, everything would be easy.

As far as I
can tell, that’s pretty normal (as normal as kids get, anyway), but I still
think it’s part of my job as a parent to teach them to cope with failure at the
least, and to celebrate it if I possibly can. And frankly, I could always use a
brush up on that last part myself.

So how do
RPGs help? Well, I have to admit that the bulk of this idea comes from Fate.
The Fate system books encourage gamemasters (the people who help apply the
rules and tell the story, while the other players control specific characters)
to make failure interesting. That’s a very different type of gaming than I’d
been exposed to before. Before that, a botched roll meant something really bad
was about to happen, and a really catastrophically bad roll meant I needed to
make a new character, because mine had died or turned to the dark side or
whatever. I remember once making a character for an epic fantasy game that was
supposed to last the whole year. I spent a long time on her, because if you’re
going to spend a year with a character, that person should be pretty cool. Two
rolls into the first game, she was dead.

In short,
failure was a bad thing in those games.

As I’m
gaming with my kids now, though, I’m actively searching for a way to make
failure interesting. Because if you know kids, you know the likely reaction to
a bad roll of the dice. I have one who would get mad. One who would cry. One who
would whine. After a bad roll, the dice hated them; it wasn’t fair; they didn’t
want to play anymore. So was the problem with them, or was it with me because I
wasn’t showing them the value of failure? I think the latter, personally.

Because
failure can be interesting and valuable. Think about all the adventure stories
where the hero tumbles down a hole only to discover something important there—maybe
the ancient temple they’ve been searching for, or a back way into the bad guys’
base of operations. They pay a price for it for certain—anything from hurt
pride to a broken ankle—but without that fall, they’d be wandering around
forever without finding what they’re looking for. That failure got them closer to their goal.

That’s the
kind of thing I’m looking to do when I’m playing RPGs with my kids. For
example, we were playing Monster of the Week, which is a mishmash of Buffy,
Supernatural, X Files, and Dresden—and it’s quite frankly awesome. In this story, the creature was very difficult to kill. You had to discover its weakness
in order to defeat it, and in the process, the characters took a beating. That
could easily be discouraging, but those defeats provided valuable information
which would lead them to the monster’s weakness. And as we were playing, I
tried to point that out. “Yes,” I’d say, “your character was knocked
unconscious, but if that hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t have discovered the
villain’s amulet on the floor. Now you’ve got a clue. And it all happened
because you didn’t give up, even when the odds were against you.”

Now, sometimes the tradeoff is more valuable than others. Sometimes it's a piece of essential information, but sometimes something a little less tangible like the good opinion of another character, or even a personal realization that you need to talk through with them. "How does your character feel right now? Determined? She's not giving up? That's pretty brave, especially when she used to be such a scaredy pants, right? Let's write down a note about that so that when this story is done, we can talk about maybe changing your character sheet to show that she's becoming a braver person."

I think it’s
working, because the last time we gamed, my son rolled a bunch of minuses
(which indicate failure, if that’s not evident from context). He rolled his eyes up to
the ceiling and threw up his hands. “Oh no,” he said. “What are you going to do
to me this time?” And then he laughed and said, "Bring it on, brah." Other than the part where he called me "brah," I thought that was pretty cool.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

So I wrote a
game. It’s called Young Centurions, and I wrote it with Clark and Amanda
Valentine, who are pretty much saints in my book. It’s a family-friendly RPG about
teenage pulp heroes—if you’re thinking Young Indiana Jones, you’re right on the
money—and yes, you do have the opportunity to play Sally Slick and Jet Black as
they set off on adventure if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s up on Kickstarter now with a bunch of other games from Evil Hat Productions, and it would be very
cool if you’d check it out.

Here’s the
thing—I’m aware that many fans of my books and people I know in general have
never played tabletop RPGs and might not know what they’re missing. I’m a
long-time gamer; in fact, my first paid writing gig was for an RPG. And in particular, I think
people don’t realize the value of playing RPGs with kids. I know that I’m
always on the lookout for fun and inexpensive activities I can do with my own kids
that are rainy-day compatible, and gaming fits the bill. Plus, there are so
many opportunities for them to learn in a way that doesn’t make you or them
want to pull your hair out.

Storytelling
RPGs offer a lot of advantages to kids beyond the obvious things like: they’re
off electronics for more than five minutes at a time; they’re talking to you in
complete sentences about things other than electronics, and they’re being
creative instead of passively sitting in front of the TV. Frankly, on some days
those things alone would sell me on the idea as a parent, but there’s a lot
more there. Today, I’d like to give you an example of a teachable opportunity
in storytelling RPGs, just to give you a peek at what I mean. And for clarity,
I’m using the word “storytelling” to denote games that focus on telling a story
with a beginning, middle, and end rather than crawling around a dungeon and
rolling dice to defeat monsters. That can also be fun, but it doesn’t fit the
definition as I’m using it here.

One thing I
noticed all three of my kids struggle to grasp is cause and effect. The whole
logic of one action causing a logical reaction just didn’t click with them. It
was particularly evident in their stories—my kids tell a lot of stories, and those things were RANDOM. Magical artifacts and unicorns would
appear and disappear without making any sense at all, and people would suddenly
stop in the middle of conversations and walk off into haunted forests where no
one left alive. Stuff like that. And school-wise, if you asked them questions
about what happened next in a book, they’d skip around and totally miss how the
elements were related. They could remember them as isolated incidents, but the
logical connections were missing.

So I started
talking to them about the whole idea of cause and effect, and let me tell you,
that was a failure. Without context, they just couldn’t grasp what I was
saying, and using examples from the media didn’t work very well, because they
had a hard time picturing alternate endings for familiar books and movies, since they already knew how the
story was “supposed” to go.

Then I
suggested we play an RPG. I used Fate Accelerated Edition (which,
coincidentally, is the same system that powers Young Centurions) to create a game
about tween superheroes. The characters were siblings who had to keep their
superpowers hidden while still fighting evil. I set up a very simple one-shot
scenario. At school, one of them discovered evidence that their arch-nemesis
had planted a bomb in the building. With their powers, finding and diffusing
the bomb would be easy; the real challenge was figuring out how to do it
without anyone learning that they were superheroes, because again, that was
a secret.

The
characters were at gym when they learned about the bomb, and when I asked how
they were going to get out of class, the random happened. One of my daughters
wanted to light the teacher’s hair on fire and run out of class in the
resulting chaos. Which is pretty ridiculous, but this is exactly what I was
hoping would happen. Here’s where I started asking questions. “That sounds
silly, but what would happen if you lit her hair on fire?” My daughter quickly
realized that this wasn’t an option and moved to what was to her a logical
alternative. She wanted to pull the fire alarm in plain sight of everyone.
Again, there were questions and discussions among all of us about the logical effect
that would result from that action. She’d get in trouble, of course, but would
that be worth it to save all the kids? Of course it would. But would they
evacuate the building if they saw her pull the alarm with no fire in sight? No.
So that wouldn’t work.

Slowly but
surely, we drew down from the wild and crazy suggestions to some very simple
solutions. One character asked to go to the bathroom, went into the stall, and
turned invisible. Another one talked back to the teacher until she got sent to the
principal’s office, and the third character—a bit of a goody-two-shoes—offered to
escort her there. The three of them then convened in the hallway for a bit of
fun action in which they located the bomb (solving another puzzle in the
process) and disarmed it with time to spare.

All in all,
it took about an hour to play, and a decent sized chunk of that time was spent
talking out how to solve the problems logically, with the kids proposing
possibilities and then the four of us talking through the likely outcomes
together to come up with the best options. I’d say they did more thinking than
they do with any workbook page I can give them, and here’s the big difference—they
hate workbook pages, but they ask me to play “that superhero game” all the
time. And it’s becoming a familiar process to them, giving them context to
understand how to begin to ask, “What would happen if…” when they tell their
own stories and “What happened when…” when they read a passage for
comprehension.

And it was
damned fun too.

That’s just
one example of many teachable opportunities you can create for kids with RPGs,
and I’ll talk about some more of them over the next few weeks. In the meantime
and as always, feel free to hit me up with questions. There is a learning curve
to starting off with tabletop RPGs, but fun and affordable educational
activities don’t come along all the time. I’m happy to help out anyone who
wants to try one with their kids or students. And of course, I hope you’ll check
out the Young Centurions RPG and stay tuned for the cover reveal as soon as it’s
available!

About Me

I like writing books, playing games, fighting evil, and cooking (everyone's got to have hobbies). My YA zombie comedy, BAD TASTE IN BOYS, is available from Delacorte Press right now! The next Kate Grable adventure, BAD HAIR DAY, will be available November 2012. Which is la awesome.